Google Updates Review-Type Results That May Impact Search Console Reports

Google has posted that it began upgrading some review-type results to product-type results in Search, and has been able to generate some new product type results. This started on August 22, 2022 and as a result, your Search Console performance and rich results report may be impacted.

Google wrote here “Google began upgrading some review-type results to product-type results in Search, and has been able to generate some new product type results.” And here that “Google began upgrading some review-type results to product-type results in Search.”

With the performance reports, Google said you might see a decrease in your Review snippet impressions and clicks and an increase in your Product results impressions and clicks. “This represents both a change in how these items looked in Search as well as where Search Console assigns these impressions and clicks,” Google explained.

With the rich results reports, Google said you might see impressions and clicks on reclassified items will also migrate from the Review report to the Product report over time. “Affected sites will see a decline in impressions in the Reviews report and a corresponding rise in impressions in the Products report. Total item counts of each type will not change, however, since Search Console did not reclassify correctly labeled structured data items,” Google added. Google also said here “this represents both a change in how these items looked in Search as well as where Search Console assigns these impressions and clicks.”

Confused? Many are, here is what John Mueller explained:

I don’t know all the details, but as far as I know, at some point we started showing/counting some product results in search slightly differently, and that ended up with some visible shifts in the numbers in Search Console. It confused some folks (and us), so we added a note.

— 🖖 johnmu (personal), logically 🖖 (@JohnMu) September 8, 2022

Advertisement

So if you see changes in these reports, that is why.

Forum discussion at Twitter.